What do you do if a colleague is starting to suffer from stress?

The signs may be obvious: anxiety, depression, a decline in work standards, emotional behaviour, time off work. But the solution?

What you and your senior colleagues will want is to help your colleague recover, both for the well-being of your colleague and of course for the well-being of the school.

But it is sometimes quite hard to see what can be done to help the individual.

In fact there are two things that you can do – one is to look at the cause of the stress that is being felt by the individual teacher and so see if anything can be changed (not only for this teacher, but for others who may also be starting to feel stressed within their job).

The other is to offer help and support to the teacher in terms of suggesting a programme of activity that can be used to help overcome the stress.

Of course, the fact that teaching is the profession which now suffers from the third highest level of stress of any occupation in the UK does not make recovery from stress easy. But if a stress reduction programme is incorporated into the school’s work and is available for any member of staff who is feeling overwhelmed by the pressure of teaching, then it is very possible that some staff who might succumb to serious levels of stress can be helped. The resultant benefits for the teacher and the school are enormous.

By introducing the teacher suffering from stress to various techniques it is quite possible that the teacher will be able to avoid the stress turning into a serious long-term illness allowing the teacher to make rapid progress on the road to recovery.

Such an approach simply recognises that the only way out of stress is for the individual to undertake the journey of recovery him/herself. That does not mean that the stress causing factors in the school or elsewhere are ignored, but it is nevertheless essential that the individual teacher is taking the steps to start to deal with stress.

The volume thus helps school managers who don’t suffer from excessive stress to understand what their colleague under stress is going through and to see how she or he can be helped.

It deals not only with ways of reducing the levels of stress that teachers suffer from, but also offers a programme of practical help that can be offered to the teacher who is suffering from stress. The volume also includes a set of templates relating to the school’s policy on stress and a risk assessment programme.

The volume can be bought as a photocopiable ring bound book or on CD Rom.